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Category Archives: IaaS

I thought I’d label 2015 as the year of the surrendering to the cloud. And by this I do not mean that mass adoption that every software vendor was waiting for, but surrendering to (1) the fact that cloud is now pervasive and it is no longer up for a debate and (2) to the dominance of Amazon Web Services.

A debate had been previously going way too long, on what are the real benefits of the cloud. And I’m not talking about end customers here, I’m talking about IT professionals, for whom new technologies should be bread and butter. But around cloud computing, they somehow showed the strongest skepticism, a high dose of arrogance (how many times I heard “we were doing cloud 20 years ago, but we were just not calling it that way”) and reluctancy to embrace change. The great majority of them underestimated the phenomenon to the point of challenging its usefulness or bringing it down to virtualisation in some other data center which is not here.

I asked myself why this has happened and I came to the conclusion that cloud has been just too disruptive, even for IT pros. To understand the benefits of the cloud in full, one had to make a mental leap. People naturally learn by small logical next steps, so cloud was interpreted just like the natural next step after having virtualised their data centres. But as I wrote more than three years ago in the blog post Cloud computing is not the evolution of virtualisation, the cloud came to solve a different problem and used virtualisation just as a delivery method to accomplish its goal. But finally, in 2015 I personally witnessed that long overdue increased level of maturity with respect to cloud technologies. Conversations I had with service providers and end customers’ IT pros were no longer about “if” to cloud or not to cloud, but about “what” and “when” instead.

What has helped achieving this maturity? I think it is the fact that nobody could ignore anymore the elephant in the room. The elephant called Amazon Web Services. That cloud pioneer and now well consolidated player that is probably five years ahead of its nearest competitor, in terms of innovation and feature richness. And not only they’re not ignoring it anymore, everyone wants to have a ride on it.

Many of those IT pros I mentioned are actually employed by major software vendors, maybe even leading their cloud strategy. Their initial misunderstanding of the real opportunity behind cloud adoption led to multi-million investments on the wrong products. And in 2015 (here we come to the surrendering number 2) we saw many of these failures surfacing up and demanding real change. Sometimes these changes were addressed with new acquisitions (like the EMC acquisition of Virtustream) or with the decision to co-opt instead of compete.

To pick some examples:

On Tuesday [Oct 6th] at AWS re:Invent, Rackspace launched Fanatical Support for AWS, beginning with U.S.-based customers. Non-U.S. customers will have to wait a while, although Rackspace will offer support for them in beta mode. In addition, Rackspace will also resell and offer support services for AWS’s elastic cloud as it’s now officially become an authorized AWS reseller.

Hewlett-Packard is dropping the public cloud that it offered as part of its Helion
“hybrid” cloud platform, ceding the territory to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. The company will focus on private cloud and traditional IT that its large corporate customers want, while supporting AWS and Azure for public cloud needs.

HP Enterprise’s latest strategy, which dovetails with earlier plans to focus on private and managed clouds, is to partner with Microsoft and become an Azure reseller.

What does this tell us? Most software vendors are now late to the game and are trying to enter the market by holding the hand of those who understood (and somewhat contribute to create) the public cloud market. But don’t we always say the cloud market is heading to commoditisation, why there seem to be no space for a considerable number of players? Certainly HP, VMware or IBM have the investment capacity of Amazon to grow big and compete head to head.

The reality is that we’re far from this commoditisation. If virtual machines may well be a commodity, they’re not more than a tiny bit of the whole cloud services offered for example by AWS (EC2 was mentioned only once during the two main keynotes at AWS re:Invent this year!). The software to enable the full portfolio of cloud services still make a whole lot of difference and to deliver it, this requires vision, leadership, understanding and a ton of talent. Millions of investments without the rest was definitely not the way.

We have debated the cloud opportunity. Sounds old? Maybe. However, surprisingly enough, the majority of IT infrastructure buyers haven’t adopted it yet. Skepticism, natural resistance to change, staff self-preservations and other excuses are amongst the primary reasons for that. If you think about it, this is actually pretty normal when a technology is so much disrupting the status quo.

The title of the webinar “Cloud Can’t Wait” may sound like a way to build the hype but, with regard to cloud, I think we all concur that, by now, the hype is way over. As I’m sure we agree that, indeed, the cloud can’t wait. Those who’ve fully embraced it have demonstrated to have significant advantages over those who haven’t, and these advantages are directly affecting their competitiveness and even their ability to stay in business.

The opportunity is for everyone

We talked about the cloud focusing on the infrastructure side of it. We have deliberately excluded SaaS consumption from the statistics and the debate, as that has a totally different adoption curve and, when put in the same basked, can easily mislead the conclusions. So rule number one, treat SaaS numbers separately.

Infrastructure-Software-as-a-Service (ISaaS): the applications required to manage IT infrastructure, including backup, archiving, disaster recovery (DR), capacity planning and, more generically, IT management as a service.

Seeing ISaaS as third category was pretty interesting to me as we all knew it existed but we never managed to label it correctly. And as Michael stated later on, expertise in this specific category is what some service providers, mostly those coming from the managed services space, can actually offer as value add on top of raw infrastructure, in order to win business in this space.

So what is this cloud opportunity we are referring to? Again, Michael explained it this way:

“[With a 29% year over year growth rate] there is the opportunity to get involved early and [as a vendor] participating in gathering lots of that cash. Instead, cloud buyers such as developers or enterprises, are not interested in participating in this growth, but in the innovation that comes out of this cloud space, they want to use this innovation and efficiency to really differentiate themselves in their own business”

So the opportunity is there and it is a win-win for everyone.

Why people are buying cloud and who are they?

If you ask yourself why people are buying cloud and what they’re using it for, you maybe won’t find the answers easily. That’s where the work of 451 Research becomes really helpful. As Michael told us, from the conversations they have everyday, it came out that most organisations use the cloud because of “the agility that it brings, the speed you can deploy IT and [afterwards] that you can use IT as a differentiator. [Because cloud] speeds time to market”.

To that, I would add that cloud also speeds the ability to deliver changes which translates into adaptability, essential for any chance of success in our rapidly transforming economy.

Michael continued on this topic:

“Over the past roughly 5 to 10 years much of the focus of IT has been on cost savings, keeping the lights on as cheaply as possible, but things are changing and qualitatively we see this in conversations we have all the time, companies are more interested in using IT to actually do something rather than just saving money, and cloud is perfectly shaped for offering that”

Great. This seems to be now well understood. The days of explaining to organisation that there is more to the cloud than the simple shift from CAPEX to OPEX, are gone.

Who are buying cloud infrastructure services today? My first answer went to:

“Developers. This word returns a lot whenever we talk about cloud. They’ve been the reason of the success of AWS, for sure. That’s because they just ‘get it’, they understand the advantages of the cloud around how they can transform infrastructure into code. For them, spinning a server is just like writing any other line of code for doing anything else. They managed to take advantage of the cloud from the very early days and they contributed to make cloud what it is today under many aspects”

With regard to enterprises, I also added:

“enterprises are [currently] investing in private clouds because that’s the most natural evolution of their traditional IT departments, but eventually, as they get to provide cloud, it’s gonna be extremely easy to get them to consume cloud [services] from third parties. That’s because cloud is more of a mindset than just a technology”

How can you profit from the cloud opportunity?

So you’re a service provider and you want to participate in the cloud opportunity. How do you do that? Michael suggests to use the “best execution venue” approach. That starts, as Michael explains, with understanding the type of workload or applications that you want to address. Then ask yourself what skills, capabilities and what assets do you have that you can leverage to address a specific type of workload? This will tell you what value you can bring on top of raw infrastructure in order to compete and take advantage of this fast-growing multi-billion market.

My comment on this was:

“Eventually service providers should not consider themselves just part of one of these [IaaS, PaaS or ISaaS, Ed.] segments. Eventually I think the segmentation of this type will not there anymore, and there will be another segmentation based more on use cases, where the service provider will specialise on something and will pick a few services to make the perfect portfolio to match a specific use case in a target market”

Yes I’m a big fan of the use case approach. As I’m a big fan of trying to understand what the cloud is exactly being used for. Even if the press tries to push the cloud as heavily commoditised service, you should never stop asking yourself what your customers are doing with it, what applications they’re running and what else you can do to make their life easier.

In any case, either you decide to leverage your existing capabilities or you try to learn what your customers want to do with your cloud, we all agreed around the following statement: it’s still very early days. As Michael again explains, there are still lots of options to get involved, it’s a great time to get involved, and the doors are definitely not closed.

I’d say they’re absolutely wide open. And many have already crossed the doorway. How about you?

During my recent experience at Structure:Europe I have engaged in a discussion regarding whether the “workload” should “care” about the cloud or not. It is a great topic to debate on and I decided to write a few more thoughts here below. But let me recall the conversation first.

The trigger was a sentence by @ditlev, CEO of OnApp, that we also heard during his session with @tonylucas during the second day of Structure, and that I commented on Twitter with:

.@richtwarner@Ditlev workloads care about the #cloud because they need to control and orchestrate the infrastructure in order to scale

Among others, @khushil, engineer at Mail Online, did not agree with me as we read his tweet replying: “wrong way around, the cloud needs to understand the workload to scale to support. other way misses the point“.

Ditlev obviously picked this up and explained further that “workloads should be agnostic, your infrastructure (incl cloud)/platform should adapt” and that he would “like to see abstraction layers between workloads and infrastructure“.

What’s the source of the workload?

One may be confused and agree in principle with everyone, as every tweet seems to be reasonable, but I think first we should make some assumptions upfront, starting from the definition of workload:

The amount of work performed by an entity in a given period of time, or the average amount of work handled by an entity at a particular instant of time. The amount of work handled by an entity gives an estimate of the efficiency and performance of that entity. In computer science, this term refers to computer systems’ ability to handle and process work.

In computer science, we indeed have several abstraction layers and that happens also with cloud computing (more insights in one of my previous post here). In such scenario, however, there are also many “entities” performing some work at those different layers. So which one is the entity whose workload we were talking about? Given what our companies do, I bet we were referring to cloud infrastructures handling and processing work that is generated by applications running on top of them.

Clarified the context, I shall explain why applications should instead care about the cloud without expecting any magic to happen down there.

The new era of IT infrastructures

We are witnessing a tremendous change in the core functioning of IT infrastructures. Up to the advent of cloud computing, the general approach taken by IT professionals was to manually provision a specific footprint made of servers, CPUs, memory, storage and network devices. That footprint was probably over-sized in order to accommodate predictable workload growth over time. Applications were designed to abstract from infrastructures, they were simply demanding more CPU cycles or IOPS whenever they wanted to, regardless of the actual availability. The result of this approach has been a tremendous increase in the total cost of ownership of IT departments. Hardware was required to be reliable, fast and able to accommodate peaks in workload without any performance loss. This all came at a price.

Two main drivers came to disrupt and trigger a drastic change. The first one is mobile computing, i.e. the demand of Internet services that suddenly became ubiquitous, leading the generation of unpredictable workload demand from anywhere in the world, at any time of the day. The second driver is the growing availability of a large quantity of data, user and machine generated Big Data, that require to be stored and analyzed.

To accommodate the above scenarios, IT infrastructures had to become completely software-driven, highly elastic and extremely scalable. With cloud infrastructures, today it is in fact possible to provision an infrastructure footprint using a few mouse clicks or a couple of functions within a few lines of code. The size of the infrastructure can be adapted to the required workload in a specific moment, no more need to over-provision, as resources can grow and shrink using few simple automatic operations.

And with the availability of software-consumable infrastructures, also applications are changing their approach, becoming much more infrastructure-aware. In fact, in case of resource shortage, applications can request for more by using API calls, growing the infrastructure footprint as required. At the same way, they’re now able to handle faults, making expensive highly available infrastructures completely worthless! (I blogged about this before here).

Think application!

All of this to explain that no, the cloud (infrastructure) does not have to understand the workload and does not have to automatically adapt to it. Even if that could be theoretically possible, the infrastructure lacks of the right metrics to recognise a real need for more resources. Instead, it is the application itself that actively adapts its own infrastructure, because only the application understands how the user experience is going, which the only metric that should be taken into consideration when measuring application performance.

Are you currently auto-scaling your infrastructure based on CPU utilisation? When it happens, are you sure that corresponds to a real improvement of the user experience? Or simply to a higher bill of your cloud provider?

And what if your VM goes down? Will you blame your cloud provider and then blog about its ridiculous SLA penalty fees, that never corresponds to your real loss of business? Isn’t it more effective to make sure that you understand the VM is down and that you (your application, I mean) take the necessary step to failover elsewhere?

With a clever application, infrastructure can be seen just as a toolbox. And you need to know how to use those tools in order to build highly available, auto-scaling applications. Don’t expect your screwdriver to build on your behalf the room for your newborn baby.

Or more simply, as @AmberCoster of AppDynamics said to me in another Twitter conversation: “Think application, not just infrastructure!”.

It has been a while since my last blog. My new engagement with Flexiant is keeping myself so busy with customers that I have plenty of reasons to think a lot but not enough time to write what I’m thinking about. Customers are indeed one the most interesting sources for people like me who always try to identify common patterns in behaviour and decisions (that are the “technology trends”, this blog’s previous title).

Yesterday, James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart) wrote about “traditional IT buyers” versus “developers” consuming cloud services, with reference to the different strategical approach taken by VMware in its vCloud Hybrid Service proposition. Just the fact that we have to word “traditional” while speaking about one of the most innovative sector of our industry, says it all about what will be the winning approach between the two.

Indeed, I concur with James when he says that VMware’s strategy will be successful in the next few years but will likely fail on the long term. Following his brilliant observations, I still feel like adding something more for all those companies who are trying (or who want) to intercept some cloud computing business by running after enterprise IT departments.

The IT infrastructure demand

First off, IT departments don’t want to get to the cloud. This is known and has been said enough, mainly due to their self-preservation instinct. But they also can’t resist this revolution. So they’re interpreting the cloud opportunity just as the shift of their data centre location, demanding the exact toolset they’ve been using in their on-premises deployment. At the other side, service providers are trying to listen to those customers and give them what they are asking for. Usually, nothing gets real because the offer hardly meets the demand, mainly due to the actual unwillingness of the IT crowd to outsource data centre control. And even if all their requirements seem to reveal the existence of a real market opportunity, I believe they’re actually driving a false demand.

Let’s take a look at the chart below. It’s far from being accurate as it’s not based on real numbers. Lines are straight as I simply wanted to help visualising the trend of what I think it’s happening.

On the overall demand of IT infrastructure, the one represented by the green area is generated by IT professionals, while the blue one is generated by developers or applications (yes, don’t forget that applications are now capable of driving IT infrastructure demand all by themselves, based on workload triggers).

Today we’re at that point in time where those two areas overlap, meaning that while there is still demand of infrastructure by IT departments, it is showing a declining pattern. According to James, VMware is really going to win the biggest slice of that declining green area but will fall short because the green area is going to disappear. And most service providers who are evolving from their colo/hosting business really seem to run after the same green demand, fighting for a shrinking market, while others are just making billions thanks to developers and their applications. And we hear traditional (ah! This word again) service providers calling that type demand simply “test and dev”?

Test and dev or software-consumable infrastructure?

We really need to move away from thinking the Amazon cloud is good for test and dev and not for production. So many times I heard the objection from providers that Amazon is just for developers because of they lack of built-in HA in the infrastructure. Needless to remind how many transaction-sensitive companies are making billions on that cloud.

People who say that are actually missing the point. Developers like and use the Amazon cloud because it is software-consumable. Because their applications can spin up a server to handle extra capacity at the same way they handle their core business logic. Also, they can handle infrastructure failure by replicating data-stores, maybe in different geographic sites, and managing failover in case of outage of the underlying infrastructure. This is the real potential of IaaS and not just the OPEX vs CAPEX scenario, not only the commoditisation of computing and storage resources, but the ability to fully automate the infrastructure provisioning and configuration as part of any application business logic.

Build and launch your developer cloud

Now that we know what developers like about the cloud, should we forecast enterprise developers stop deploying applications on-premises and finally do that in the cloud, thus becoming part of the blue demand? That’s what many people may think, but then, I’ve come across this from James Urquhart again:

I was asked to speak at the Insight Integrated Systems Real Cloud Summit in Long Beach, Calif. […] The RealCloud audience was primarily medium size businesses (between 500 and 10,000 employees), and I jumped at the chance to meet a segment of the IT industry with which I rarely interact.

About half way through my talk […] I came to a point I thought was very important to most software developers. On a whim, I asked this audience how many of them saw custom software development as a key part of their IT strategy. I expected about half the room of 100 or so to respond positively.

Boom. Any discussion about why developers were bypassing IT to gain agility in addressing new models was immaterial here. The idea that Infrastructure as a Service and Platform as a Service were going to change the way software was going to be built and delivered just didn’t directly apply to these guys.

Well, that explains the success of packaged software so far. But does that mean that the demand for hosting packaged software will gradually move to the cloud? I don’t believe so. Instead, I believe that packaged software will simply be re-invented via SaaS model. It has been already demonstrated how that model can be extremely successful and broad in its adoption (Salesforce.com, Workday, etc).

I believe enterprises will eventually move from in-house hosted packaged software directly to consuming SaaS without passing through intermediate steps, like running the same packaged software in some “enterprise” or “IT” IaaS clouds. Everyone’s waiting for enterprises to start moving their workload, but eventually they will make a big jump all at once. Maybe even without letting their IT departments contribute to that choice (as it’s mainly a business decision).

In the end, if you’re a service provider who aims at finally getting the enterprise workload to the cloud, you’d probably better focus on standing up a software-consumable cloud (a.k.a. “developer cloud”) and go after all those SaaS companies, small and big, to get your slice of the real cloud market. Stop thinking your HA cloud is better than “test and dev” clouds (like Amazon?) and stop discarding the web-scale companies (as SaaS companies are sometimes referred to) from your target market but give them the importance they deserve. If you don’t do that, one day, you may lose the entire enterprise IT business at once.

When I read market research firms saying that SaaS is the most adopted cloud model by the enterprises I can’t but concur due to the ease of use and the simplicity of integration with existing IT assets. Actually, the integration ends up being minimal and entirely in developers’ hands, who can make use of the SaaS service usually comprehensive API, thus completely bypassing their internal IT department.

So what about IaaS and PaaS? Should those who invested heavily in those two cloud models start worrying about their choice? No way. As my provocative title says, I am fairly much convinced that the lower layers of the cloud stack eventually share the whole cloud business, with IaaS eating the biggest slice of it, both directly and indirectly.

I am actually writing this post to give further insight and supporting data to a tweet of mine I wrote some time ago:

Any #SaaS company needs an underlying autoscaling #PaaS that needs an underlying elastic #IaaS. In #cloud adoption IaaS always wins.

Layers over layers

In computer science we are used to have layers over layers called “abstraction layers“, each one of them aimed at hiding the complexity of the lower one, while providing some kind of added value and an interface for the immediately upper layer to access resources. With the rise of cloud services, the approach of the community has been the same again: using abstraction layers to handle the increased complexity of IT infrastructures, which now involve thousands of resources to be managed and orchestrated.

As mentioned above, there are three main cloud layers largely accepted by the community: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. However, many cloud providers don’t fit exclusively in one of them as they tend to enlarge their offering with different services at multiple layers of the stack. Since this creates a little confusion among cloud consumers, I want to take the opportunity to present them one more time from a different perspective, trying to concentrate on what added value each layer brings to the stack.

Ok, I still have to work a bit on my ability to visually represent concepts but I hope the above chart can help making some clarification. First, we have raw resources at the bottom of the stack and if we add some elasticity we obtain an IaaS. This is over-simplified as there are certainly more values brought by any good IaaS layer, however, for the sake of understanding, I’ll limit myself to the most evident one: elasticity, a.k.a. the ability to create, destroy, enlarge and shrink computing resources on demand via an API.

Let’s now go upper, we have an IaaS layer and we decide to add some DevOps tools and operations such as middlewares, auto-scaling, application deployment and code validation mechanisms. While doing that, if the principle of abstraction layers is respected, we don’t need to care anymore about how to handle raw resources, since the IaaS provides us with tools to automate their management. What we obtain is a Platform-as-a-Service, an environment where multiple users can deploy their applications.

Eventually, let’s take some business logic to solve a specific problem (i.e. CRM, ERP, etc) and, provided of course that we have done all the multi-tentancy stuff and that we want it to be consumed as-a-service, we are now working at the SaaS layer. At this stage, we can concentrate on making our software more powerful, adding killing features and conquering our market niche. We don’t need (neither we do want, right?) to take care of all the infrastructure to serve our users nor we want to know what hardware lies underneath, as those would be just a distraction from our core business focus.

Sounds logical doesn’t it? All the layers stack up together so nicely and they look so complementary. Indeed they are. In fact, cloud companies end up buying services from other cloud companies that operate at a lower level of the stack. For further evidence, I have done a small research and I found out that most SaaS companies deploy their software on top of a PaaS provider that, itself, deploys its automation layer on top of one (or more) IaaS providers. What does that mean? That if an enterprise adopts a SaaS cloud service and pays for it, eventually some dollars will end up in some IaaS providers’ pocket. You like it or not.

The infrastructure of PaaS providers

To bring supporting examples, let’s check the most popular PaaS providers infrastructures as they’re most likely obliged to reveal their backends in order to inform their customers on their data center locations.

The cloud market is known to be huge and it is mandatory for every player in the IT industry today to take up a position, a vision and a direction within this space. If you’re an investor who wants to participate in the cloud opportunity, it is extremely valuable to understand how different cloud models are currently sharing the market. On the other hand, if you’re an enterprise evaluating the adoption of any cloud service, you should be concerned about who’s running the games up and down the cloud stack, as this will eventually affect you service level, your security and your data integrity.

POST UPDATE on 4/8/2013

I’ve been asked by Jack Clarke (@mappingbabel) of ZDnet on what basis did I single out the above PaaS providers as “most popular”. The answer I gave him is press coverage as well as “on the field”, meaning talking to customers and gathering experiences. It’s a simple personal feeling which is not based on any scientific data. I’m actually a field person and not a researcher. Besides, I don’t think any of those provider is really willing to disclose customer data.

However, it’s noteworthy to mention there are other PaaS services offered by large vendors that are difficult to define in terms of popularity; the press usually refers to the vendor as a whole and since they’re no longer in the startup phase, you can’t even measure the funding amount they’ve received from VCs. Despite the difficult measurability, I owe them a mention in this post for being active players in the PaaS landscape, contributing effectively to the cloud awareness battle.

And one can assume the above theory is respected by the above providers as well, for example with Elastic Beanstalk running on top of EC2 and App Engine running on top of Compute Engine. However, given those services are provided by the same vendor as the PaaS provider, they don’t trigger any economic transaction and thus no real shift in the measurement of the market size.

Enterprise private clouds are failing. As I’ve also written on a Quora answer to “What is the future of private cloud?”, no matter what marketing and vendors are saying, efficient, large scale production enterprise private clouds don’t exist as of today. In my opinion, cloud is an extremely new model in delivering IT infrastructure that the culture of its utilization won’t be able to reach the enterprise with a bottom-up approach (evolving from their current infrastructure) but only taking a top-down direction (deploying into public clouds and then migrating back in-house). A revolution as opposed to an evolution.

Enterprise private clouds are failing due to the wrong approach taken by the IT department. Treating the cloud just like an infrastructure stack instead of a service, because “you are building the private cloud without engaging the buyers who will consume this cloud”, Staten says.

And of course, I wasn’t the only one recognizing “the truth” in James Staten’s words. His opinion on failing private clouds echoed throughout the web, generating a large consensus among cloud experts and visionaries such as James Urquhart (@jamesurquhart):

@Staten7 This is a post I wish I had written. Phenomenally clear articulation of the problem IT has with an infra-first focus on cloud.

The two cloud models

Much has been already written about different approaches to the cloud and big brains have concluded that all of them can be summarized in two different cloud models. They have been given various names according to the author, but I shall refer to the nomenclature of the OpenNebula blog post.

Datacenter Virtualization model: cloud as an extension of virtualization in the datacenter. Some more automation, service catagloue, etc. VMware vCloud-like approach.

With reference to the above models, James Staten is basically saying that the Datacenter Virtualization cloud model is wrong. That is not the right approach to implementing a private cloud. Because “a Porsche is [not] just a Volkswagen with better engine, tires, suspension and seats.”

Awesome. I’ve been convinced about that for some time. If you read my very first post on “Cloud Computing is not the evolution of virtualization”, as the title says, I’ve been always considering exclusively the Infrastructure Provision model as the only possible cloud implementation, completely excluding the Datacenter Virtualization to be even called cloud.

And I don’t think this was an extremist approach. As I said many times, cloud is a tremendous opportunity for the enterprise to start thinking differently. In my opinion, cloud will be able to reach the enterprise IT departments only using a top-down approach: from a public cloud implementation to back in-house. Enterprise cloud consumers will try (and love) the public cloud and eventually drive the implementation of something similar within the enterprise itself. But trying to transform the current virtualized infrastructure into a private cloud will simply fail. Fail to deliver a real elastic and service-oriented cloud infrastructure to the real cloud consumers.

Vendors didn’t get it

So what? All enterprise IT departments simply didn’t get it? What’s their problem? It’s a vendor problem. Enterprise software vendors didn’t get it. Every one of them started to think of the cloud as an opportunity (that’s good, as a matter of principle) and they all just tried to profit from the hype. For virtualization technology vendors, that was an easy path: adding a new product to their portfolio to “cloudify” the existing virtualization products, that would have been a natural extension to existing implementations within the enterprise. The perfect scenario for IT departments. Pity that it doesn’t work to deliver what cloud consumers are looking for.

But recently we heard something new from virtualization vendors. They actively started perceiving public clouds, and AWS in particular, as a threat to the workload which is (was?) currently running on their virtualization technology and that’s failing to migrate to private clouds for the above reasons. Despite their very rich cloud products portfolio, workload is still moving from the enterprises to commodity public clouds. Why?

Titles are usually provocative and I won’t judge its veracity, however there is no such thing as the “Cloud Uptime” because, despite the cloud is considered as a whole, you can imagine that it is made of thousands of components and not all of them go down at once. Therefore, the outage within a cloud service tends to be bigger the more these components are interdependent. I’m going to explain this more in details.

Cloud Outages

The article says “Cloud Outages” are eventually inevitable because doing better than 99.99% availability would cost too much and companies like Netflix (which suffered its cloud provider outage right on Christmas Eve) would still continue using the cloud just because eventually “it does a great job of providing ready-to-use features”. In other words, it says that using the cloud requires a compromise that companies with multi-million businesses are ready to take: losing money from time to time in exchange of the flexibility of the cloud. My dear, I refuse to believe that.

First off, cloud providers do things differently and we can’t generalize. Let’s narrow down to AWS as this is the cloud provider the article mainly refers to. AWS is primarily an IaaS provider with some service components operating at the PaaS layer, such as the ELB (Elastic Load Balancer). In this context, there is no such thing as a “Cloud Outage” but there is the outage of a component of the cloud that your application relies on and that your application has not been instructed to handle in case of failure.

When working at the PaaS layer your freedom is limited. On one hand, you don’t have to worry about how things work underneath because the provider does everything for you but, on the other hand, you also have to rely on it when it comes to availability and SLA. Netflix relied on ELB and their application had no other way to handle its failure than waiting for AWS to fix the problem.

So how should Netflix prevent such things from now on? As others have also said, they should just build their own load balancing service by operating at the IaaS layer. In this case, they would have the freedom and the responsibility to set up multiple LBs in different availability zones or even different data centers, making their application more resilient in case of any infrastructure outage.

The responsibility of a PaaS provider

Later, the article goes through a list of PaaS provider duties in case of an outage. When I read it the second time I figured out that the term PaaS was misused as the author was instead referring to a generic provider offering any kind of services through the cloud.

However, this gives me the chance to say that a real PaaS provider should never ever suffer from any underlying infrastructure outage. The PaaS software should be the very best example of highly available resilient application, architected to exploit most of the isolation/redundancy mechanisms made available by the underlying IaaS. In the end, a PaaS provider employs mostly DevOps who master cloud automation tools and best-practices and who do know how to make an application resilient.

Moreover, a PaaS cloud is not about elasticity or scalability, as the article says, but those two come from the underlying IaaS: it’s the infrastructure that scales, it’s the infrastructure that grows and shrinks fast. Whereas PaaS is all about about automation: automated deployment, auto-scaling, automated failover and recovery on infrastructure failures.

What cloud uptime is about

In conclusion, more than 99.99% is actually possible and there are examples of that. Joyent is one that managed to deliver 99.9999% of uptime in the last 2 years. So how to build more reliable clouds? Simply by architecting an infrastructure with the least possible number of interdependent components. A cloud infrastructure made of distributed and replicated micro-components is capable of delivering scalability and reliability while limiting the impact of an outage, preserving the overall SLA.

Two things to keep in mind for the best uptime of your application in the cloud:

Choose an IaaS provider with an architecture designed to limit the impact of outages. If this sounds too theoretical, then think about EBS (AWS Elastic Block Store) which is a centralized macro-component highly dependent on the network.

Choose to have the freedom to build your own resilient app at the IaaS layer and, if you decide to go PaaS, pick a provider with an refund policy in case of outage that is significative enough for your business.

And in the end, Netflix will keep using the cloud because they learnt from this experience and they know that mastering cloud best-practices can save them from the next (indeed inevitable) infrastructure outage.

The cloud is finally losing a bit of the hype and many organizations’ CIOs heard enough that are now ready to do something real with it. And that question comes to their mind: which application do I move first?

Enough has been said about the choice between IaaS, PaaS or SaaS that I assume the first step to the cloud will be towards raw infrastructure, giving up a bit of the sovereignty but still keeping all the power to architect and manage applications.

But the first moves to the cloud will lead many CIOs into a few mistakes. First off, they will think of the cloud as a simple shift of responsibility regarding the infrastructure management, thus making the cloud adoption become only a matter of SLA, data integrity and security.

As a consequence of the same assumption, they will think they could probably move their business critical applications over to the cloud “as is”, looking for a cloud provider that offers exactly the same manageability and features as the ones they were used to in their own data centre.

The cloud is a tremendous opportunity to start thinking differently

I’ve read two interesting articles recently that contain a couple of very important points about doing things with cloud infrastructures. The first one titled “Which Apps to Move to the Cloud?” starts by quoting Forrester research saying:

[…] you shouldn’t be thinking about what applications you can migrate to the cloud. That isn’t the path to lower costs and greater flexibility. Instead, you should be thinking about how your company can best leverage cloud platforms to enable new capabilities. Then create those new capabilities as enhancements to your existing applications… you have to think differently as you approach cloud development. There’s far more power in application design and configuration once you free yourself from assumed reliance on the infrastructure. The end result is new degrees of freedom for developers – if you embrace the new model.

Later, the author goes through the different types of applications being used in the enterprise comparing them to the layers of onions (yeah, just like Ogres). The inner layers are applications with most innovation, intellectual property and value to the company core busines, the outer layers are commodity apps. His conclusion is that maybe the outer layers are better to start with when moving to the cloud.

Again it’s only about risk. Let’s start with a lower risk (of loosing data or interrupting business processes) in exchange of the popular “more flexibility at lower cost” of the cloud.

The second article (very smart read, IMHO) appeared on cio.com tries to think of the cloud in the enterprise world, something that has very few success stories so far, listing some very important advices, one of them attracted my attention:

[…] a leading cloud provider would never consider adding any application to its portfolio without a clear plan for how it will scale over time. Corporate IT? Not so much. “They build infrastructure to scale out,” Paquet says, “but if their applications don’t, what problem have they actually solved?” Think scale first. And that may mean ruling out many packaged application. “Most of them are not built to scale out,” says Paquet.

What we understand from these two articles is that the cloud gives you a new infrastructure footprint that “enables new capabilities” and thus it’s you who have to adapt yourself to the cloud and not vice versa. Moreover, you have “more power in application design and configuration” that application architecture does make a difference.

Ok but… technically speaking, what exactly can I move out today?

Now that we got the above statements, we still want to start moving something to the cloud today and we don’t want to develop everything from scratch adding up delay to our cloud adoption. What both articles don’t explain clearly is: what are the technical characteristics of the applications that I can move to the cloud?

Here’s a checklist that helps you understanding if your application is cloud-ready:

The application must be designed to scale by adding different instances of the same application process one next to another on different machines, applying some kind of mechanism to share the workload without depending on the OS.
This methodology, that results into a both scalable and resilient app, is strictly required when moving to the cloud as you don’t know what kind of hardware is being used underneath (you can actually easily assume they’re just commodity servers)

The application data store must be partitionable. If you have a high amount of data growing linearly, then you can split it into different chunks, each to be bound to one of the application nodes.

The data store partitions should be able to be replicated on other nodes in order to achieve redundancy.

If you are running any application and that matches the above patterns, you can feel free to move it to the cloud today without worrying about loosing data or interrupting your business processes, provided that you make good use of the application configuration capabilities!

As I’m pretty sure you’ll have to go through some architectural review, while doing that, keep in mind to think only at the application level with nothing strictly depending on the operating system. This will give you extra freedom to migrate between cloud providers and complete self-sufficiency to implement your highly available application tiers in the way you prefer.

If you want to dig deeper into these principles, I advise you to read over Amazon Dynamo Paper that explains the theory and the trade-off between consistency and availability and that inspired great cloud-ready applications like Riak noSQL key-value store.

In conclusion, the cloud enables commodity IT infrastructures at extremely low price. With this in mind, you simply can’t demand that if you move your single instance database onto one virtual machine in the cloud, this will never go down. On the other hand, cloud infrastructures today offer all the mechanisms and features that, if mastered, can help you building the most highly available application clusters you ever had before.

Many of you may probably think that after the success of virtualization technology they had to invent something appealing to keep pushing sales and they called it Cloud Computing. And the same people would think that cloud computing is just an extra layer on top of your virtualization management platform for better and coordinated resource management, that provides things like billing, machine catalogues, self-provisioning, etc.

Cloud Computing actually has a much wider meaning (that sometimes makes it simply look like a marketing trend) so today I will narrow it down and focus on cloud infrastructures. The questions I will try to answer are: what is a cloud infrastructure, and when can you say you’re really running your business in the cloud?

To provide the right answers, you have to think of the applications that you want to run on your IT infrastructure. Many of you have probably gone through the server consolidation process that made VMware a billion dollar company: you had lots unused hardware resources but you still wanted to separate operating environments so, no problem, hardware virtualization could solve that for you, without the need to change anything in your application code or architecture. The same application you were running before on the bare-metal would run exactly in the same way inside a virtual machine.

After server consolidation practices became common, somehow the evolution of hardware virtualization went much faster than the evolution of applications. Hypervisor vendors started to provide more and more features to make the underlying hardware always available for running applications, so they could endlessly run without even caring about potential hardware failures.

What people tend to forget when buying powerful hardware platforms is that application failures are much more the primary reason of outages than hardware failures. For this reason, sooner or later you realize that and you have to build up an application-level redundancy in order to implement a real highly available system. But with application-level redundancy, do you still need to have underlying expensive hardware? Why not to run your application on commodity servers?

This question will lead to the real concept of cloud computing. Let’s now try to give a definition: a cloud infrastructure can be called so if it:

And what is the purpose of all of the above? If you think carefully, you’ll realize that it’s all aimed at commoditizing the infrastructure itself. Companies shouldn’t spend anymore time to build up their IT foundations but they should concentrate on their actual business workflows, supported by really innovative applications. Infrastructure is something they want to take for granted.

In this scenario, a cloud platform should have another important characteristic: it has to be cheap.

So can you achieve all of that with a traditional hardware virtualization-powered infrastructure? No.

Scalability will be an issue if you’re using centralized resources (that can’t grow big forever) that are usually necessary for providing hardware-level HA.

You will feel safe thanks to all those automatic live machine migration features but don’t forget that they protect you only from hardware failures. If the application fails there is not much they can do for you. You should protect yourself from application failures by building a redundant application architecture but, if you do so, do you still need expensive hardware-level HA? No, you don’t.

And one more thing, cost. Hardware virtualization infrastructures require complex high-end hardware that won’t get the point of being cheap in order to turn the IT infrastructure into a commodity.

In the end, do you want to run your old legacy application in the cloud? Forget it. Just keep it on your powerful expensive virtualization platform. That will work just fine. But if you’re a visionary who believes in a future that requires performant, scalable, elastic and cheap commodity IT infrastructures, then choose your next applications to be cloud aware. That will take you much further, much faster.